Office Profile -- Honolulu;

Page 1

Vfbnolulu
Oahu
Molokai
Maui
Lanai
Kahoolawe
Hawaii
Change, they say, is inevitable. No­where
does this inevitability show it­self
more insistently than in Hawaii,
where so much depends on staying
the same, yet the thrust of everything
is change. The very essence of life in
the Islands is preservation of outdoor
tropical beauty and placid, happy
ways, yet the surge is to more hotels,
more shops (more banks, too, and
loan offices), more TV towers, more
acres of blacktopped airports and
highways.
In a land where the call is from
secluded beaches, who can look up
with comfort to a 400-room hotel cut
into the black rock? Who can learn
that unspoiled children picked keawe
thorns from their bare feet in these
once hot sands, and still now com­placently
ride a golf cart across wa­tered
fairways? Who can gaze from
Waikiki across the bay to Barbers
Point twenty miles westward and real­ize
those two faint silhouettes against
the setting sun are stacks at the oil
refinery—and not cringe? Who, in­deed,
can sing about his "little brown
gal in the little grass skirt in the little
grass shack..."', knowing that she's
living in a 20th floor apartment in
Waikiki?
Who can? A million two hundred
thousand visitors can. They came last
year (for an average stay of five
days). This year it will be a million
four. A hundred thousand people in
the armed services can, too. (Their
longest stay may be three years.) And
so can most of the 700,000 Island
dwellers who are busy riding elevators,
fighting traffic, catching planes to the
Mainland; rushing to that golf course,
to the yacht club, to dance at the
Royal, to dig the art show, to pick up
the sitter, to do their jogging; going to
conferences, designing ads, washing
windows, fixing cars, auditing financial
statements; and generally enjoying a
per capita income that puts Hawaii in
17th place among the 50 states.
They are so busy they don't really
have much time to think about these
things. "Change?" says Herb Yamane,
who became a principal in the H & S
Honolulu Office in 1967. "Well, I don't
know. There are lots of new buildings."
And to most Honolulu and outer-island
businessmen, activity means business,
and business couldn't be better. Where
else will you find 1967 to 1968 retail
sales up 14 per cent, construction up
24 per cent, bank clearings up 19 per
cent and unemployment at less than 3
per cent of the work force?
It's all relative, of course. Those peo­ple
who come back to the Islands to­day
and cry shame because the road
to the Pali cuts a broad swath out of
verdant Nuuanu Valley are only echo­ing
what those before them exclaimed
in i960 when Hawaii became a state
and gave u p any official rights to being
a carefree dependency; or in 1937
when the union came to the sugar
plantations; or in 1929 when the first
inter-island plane service doomed the
steamships; or in 1893 when Queen
Liliuokalani, the last of Hawaii's royal
rulers, gave way to a provisional gov­ernment
and eventual annexation by
the U. S. in 1900. Even Captain Cook,
whose first voyage of discovery was in
1788, must on his return have rued the
changes—if he had time before he was
killed at Kealakekua Bay by natives.